Financial Friction

Financial headlines today are dominated by this mornings jobs report. Pundits are highlighting the October uptick in wages. Unfortunately, our analysis of the data shows that most of this increase is related to the clean-up work in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew by utility companies across the eastern seaboard.

Besides Logging and Mining no other industry grew wages more than 1.2%. source: BLS

Higher wages are part of the answer to our ongoing quest for consumer demand. With wage growth flat across most other industries, we will need to wait a bit longer to find out what's really happening to wages.